School Admits Copying Comic Book's Soldier Image Thu Aug 29, 9:36 AM ET By Greg Frost CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (Reuters) - When MIT announced in March that it won a $50 million grant to design high-tech gear for the U.S. Army's "soldier of the future," the project was hailed as the stuff of science fiction and comic book heroes. It turns out there was a lot more to those plaudits than most people realized. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology grudgingly acknowledged on Wednesday that it copied images from the sci-fi comic book "Radix" as part of its winning bid to host a research center that aims to make soldiers partly invisible and allow them to clear 20-foot walls in a single bound. But with the Canadian creators of "Radix" crying foul and weighing their legal options, the tale may not end there. The illustration in question -- a masked female soldier -- appeared on page 13 of a grant proposal MIT submitted to the Pentagon to host the high-tech Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies. When MIT won the grant, beating out other schools such as Cornell University, national news media used the image to illustrate the kinds of futuristic warrior gear that the institute hoped to develop. "It was an innocent use," MIT spokesman Ken Campbell said. "We didn't know it was from anyone else's artwork." The university issued a statement explaining its stance on Wednesday after an article appeared in the Boston Globe. click for complete story
i think this $50 million should be given to somebody else. when i've plaguarized in school, i got zero outta whatever...so should MIT. also...this threads already been posted...or somethin very similar: http://207.44.140.146/php3/showthread.php?s=&threadid=40328
I think it's the color of the armor. It doesn't take an MIT professor to figure out that a good armor should cover the stomach...
more importantly the school that can actually do the job best, should get the grant if that's still MIT, they should keep the project they didn't publish this design, they are actually building it it's like Arthur C. Clark being ticked at NASA for building a space station
It looks like a copyright infringement, so I think the creators should have at least a small portion of the grant. But then again, I just realized the creators are Canadians, so it wouldn't break my heart if they don't collect a cent.